May 4, the commemoration of Saint Monica

I do not well remember what reply I made to her about this. However, it was scarcely five days later — certainly not much more — that she was prostrated by fever. While she was sick, she fainted one day and was for a short time quite unconscious. We hurried to her, and when she soon regained her senses, she looked at me and my brother as we stood by her, and said, in inquiry, “Where was I?” Then looking intently at us, dumb in our grief, she said, “Here in this place shall you bury your mother.” I was silent and held back my tears; but my brother said something, wishing her the happier lot of dying in her own country and not abroad. When she heard this, she fixed him with her eye and an anxious countenance, because he savored of such earthly concerns, and then gazing at me she said, “See how he speaks.” Soon after, she said to us both: “Lay this body anywhere, and do not let the care of it be a trouble to you at all. Only this I ask: that you will remember me at the Lord’s altar, wherever you are.” And when she had expressed her wish in such words as she could, she fell silent, in heavy pain with her increasing sickness.

But as I thought about thy gifts, O invisible God, which thou plantest in the heart of thy faithful ones, from which such marvelous fruits spring up, I rejoiced and gave thanks to thee, remembering what I had known of how she had always been much concerned about her burial place, which she had provided and prepared for herself by the body of her husband. For as they had lived very peacefully together, her desire had always been — so little is the human mind capable of grasping things divine — that this last should be added to all that happiness, and commented on by others: that, after her pilgrimage beyond the sea, it would be granted her that the two of them, so united on earth, should lie in the same grave.

When this vanity, through the bounty of thy goodness, had begun to be no longer in her heart, I do not know; but I joyfully marveled at what she had thus disclosed to me — though indeed in our conversation in the window, when she said, “What is there here for me to do any more?” she appeared not to desire to die in her own country. I heard later on that, during our stay in Ostia, she had been talking in maternal confidence to some of my friends about her contempt of this life and the blessing of death. When they were amazed at the courage which was given her, a woman, and had asked her whether she did not dread having her body buried so far from her own city, she replied: “Nothing is far from God. I do not fear that, at the end of time, he should not know the place whence he is to resurrect me.” And so on the ninth day of her sickness, in the fifty-sixth year of her life and the thirty-third of mine, that religious and devout soul was set loose from the body.

I closed her eyes; and there flowed in a great sadness on my heart and it was passing into tears, when at the strong behest of my mind my eyes sucked back the fountain dry, and sorrow was in me like a convulsion.

Augustine, Confessions, Book IX, chapter xi, writing about his mother’s dying. I read these lines every year on the Feast of Saint Monica, the 4th of May—I reread the Confessions yearly—and they always water my eyes. The thought of dying away from home is unwelcome in any country, and this was true only more so in the cultures of the Ancient Near East. Monica is one of history’s great mothers. She and her husband Patricius recognized early that their son was prodigiously gifted—Augustine remains one of the brightest luminaries in intellectual history—and they made great sacrifices to provide him with the best possible education. (He would be tutored in rhetoric by Ambrose, the venerable Bishop of Milan. The expression, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”? That’s Ambrose giving counsel to Augustine.)

God willing, like Augustine someday I’ll bury my Yokohama mama far away from her ancestors. And as for my Dad, I don’t know that he’s read the Confessions, but on my okasan’s 70th birthday he more or less quoted Monica verbatim. All of us children had come home for the occasion when, over coffee, Mom brought up the subject of where she and Dad would be buried. Dad will have privileges at Arlington National Cemetery, but when the time comes he said to all of us kids, “I don’t care where you bury me. You can tell the mortician when he lays me out to point my toes. You can get a maul and pound me in the ground wherever you want because the Lord will know where to find me.”

“God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath. And this the more, because it is one of the appointed conditions of the labor of men that, in proportion to the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the fulness of the fruit; and that generally, therefore, the farther off we place our aim, and the less we desire to be ourselves the witnesses of what we have labored for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success. Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can benefit those who come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.”
— John Ruskin, Religious Light in Architecture, in *The Seven Lamps of Architecture*

“If the Word was indeed made flesh, then it is demanded of men that their words and their lives be in concord. Only he who is true can speak the truth.”
— W. H. Auden, “Words and The Word” (1968)

Mortality calls us to one another, to hold and be held by one another, embrace and gather. When someone is dying we want to be at the bedside. I read the daily death count, the numbers, the statistics. The tally itself is a deep wound to those who are dying and those who survive that death in the family because it takes away one of the essential elements of a good death and a good funeral; the element of story, our story, which not only includes our biography — what we did this day or that day — but it includes our ancestors, where we came from, what we believed in, what we hold dear, what gives us hope. Our religious and our faith impulses are all included in the story that in this pestilence we’re not allowed to tell because we can’t gather together to share it with one another. It is such a deep wound to the impulses that grief calls us to, to get together, and to commune with one another. 

It adds insult to injury. The numbers on mortality are convincing; they hover right around one hundred percent. But we’ve all seen individual deaths that have been so overwhelmed by circumstances — the act of terrorism, or the school shooting, or the plane crash, or the pandemic — that we lose the individual stories. 

What kind of crisis is there coming, is there now, with people who are not being allowed to grieve in the way that many people expect to get to do, whether it’s being at someone’s bedside as they’re dying or if it’s just being able to come together for anything from an Irish wake to a formal gathering in a church? One of my teachers, Brevard Childs, the bed of heaven to him, may he rest in peace, used to say, “Grief will have its way with you.” You can pay the psychotherapist. You can pay the clergy. You can pay the bartender. But you will pay. Grief is really the other side of the coin of love, and it comes calling for the tax that is due on loving people.

People have said to me for years that it must be very difficult to see people in their grief and bereavement, and it is. But you also see the deep attachments and real love we bear for one another and the kindness and the courtesy that humans do to and for and with one another. 

The time will come round when we can exercise the large muscle investments we have to make in our dead, the heart and the shoulders and the shovel work and that type of thing. In the meantime, the bereavement letter, which used to be a formal ritual in Victorian times, we should find again, the putting pen to paper to condole and console with one another.

Someone asked me the other day what I would say to those who are going through losing a loved one in this pandemic. I am not qualified to say. I’ve buried people I love, a still-born daughter, a father-in-law, close friends, but I’ve never been through a grief that I couldn’t embrace, that I couldn’t whisper in the ear of, that I couldn’t place something in the coffin of, that I couldn’t bend and kiss the forehead of, and pat the hand of, so I can’t imagine the heartbreak. But I will say that faith sustains us, and family and friends sustain us. “Grief shared,” Edgar Jackson used to say, “is grief diminished.” We have to find people to help us do the heavy lifting. These times remove a lot of those options from us, but we’ll find ways.

The hope within us

At Christmas and Easter the Church asks us to believe the two things hardest to believe: that God became an infant, and that a man dead as a doornail is having breakfast with his friends. The Faith doesn’t get any harder than this; the rest of it, frankly, is a piece of cake. 

Resurrection faith is hard. John the Evangelist knew that, as any honest Christian does. Undertakers are just as busy this week as they were in January. The graves and resting places of those we dearly love are not like Jesus’ tomb; they are not empty. 

On Good Friday, in the evening, I learned that Bruce Portner died that afternoon. Take Bruce, Kim, and Sutter into your prayers. The Resurrection doesn’t spare us from dying, from grief. We can’t gloss over this. The New Testament doesn’t. Take this appointed reading for the second Sunday of Easter from the first letter of Peter [1. 3 – 9]. “In this — in the living hope given to us through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead — you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.” 

Easter fuses two seemingly contradictory emotions: joy and grief. Sorrow exists right alongside joy; the one does not confer immunity from the other. In John’s gospel [chapter 15], Jesus, on the night of his betrayal, said, “I tell you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.” In the very next verse he talks about his death. “My command is this: love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Moments later he was in the Garden of Gethsemane telling his disciples “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” 

As for me, today, I see myself in the two Marys running away from the empty tomb, “with fear and great joy.” I see you in them, too. We are always feeling those two emotions at the same time. Fear and joy. Sorrow and hopefulness. 

What leaves us brokenhearted doesn’t separate us from God. “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” [Ps 34] “He will call on me and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble.” [Ps 91] “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me,” the psalmist says in Psalm 23. Intimacy with God is real at the worst possible moments of stress and anguish and fear in our lives.

Job writes, “Man that is born of a woman / is of few days, and full of trouble. / He comes forth like a flower, and withers; / he flees like a shadow, and continues not.” Speaking with God about what would follow his own death, Job says, “You will call, and I will answer you; you will long for the creature your hands have made. ” Here memory and longing are fused, like fear and joy, like doubt and faith. 

The Risen Christ saves sinners, and he does more than that. Jesus’ passion condoles and sanctifies our sorrow, baptizes it with dignity and beauty. Grief can be an ugly thing, but living with it is not an ugly thing.

We long to be free of our sufferings. They fill our minds as Job’s sufferings filled his, like a sea of unwanted dreams. I think there is a hope that sleeps behind the doors locked in the heart of all of us even when we do not know what to call it. I think we glimpse that hope when we are wiser or stronger or more loving than left to ourselves we know how to be, when we are overwhelmed by joy and tragedy and the beauty and holiness of life that lie deeper than either. I think that just our longing for it, our listening for it, can stir that hope to life within us. And I think that the Risen Christ walks through the doors we close the way he appears to Thomas through locked doors, not because he is less real than they are but because he is so much more real, more solid, the same way that you and I can walk through air or water. 

Honest Thomas

[See John 20. 19 – 31] Thomas is a parade example of how to move from doubt to faith. His doubt is honest. He wasn’t willing to pretend he got it. He wasn’t able to believe in the resurrection, but he wasn’t willing to believe in something less than the resurrection. He could have made life easier for himself by nodding when the others told him that they saw Jesus. Yes, yes, he could have said, I get what you’re saying; a spiritual resurrection, Jesus still living in my heart, in the influence that he continues to have in my life. But Thomas doesn’t settle for that. 

He is in that upper room behind locked doors at great personal risk to his life. He doesn’t run away. He doesn’t blow off his friends and figure well, that’s fine for you but it’s not for me. He realizes that if it’s true that Jesus actually rose from the dead there’s nothing more important. May our own doubts drive us to Thomas’ kind of honesty. And may we continue always to be the kind of community where the Thomas in each of us can be in the room. Where Everyone’s welcome. Nobody’s perfect. Anything’s possible. Welcome to St Stephen’s.

In solitude, for company

From John 13, verse 33. Jesus said, “I am with you only a little longer . . . Where I am going, you cannot come.” May I speak in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. The summer before my junior year of high school, just the other day, I sat in the bleachers of a stadium in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. The start of school was weeks away. We’d picked up our helmets and shoulder pads and we were sitting in the bleachers so the coach could tell us what to expect as we prepared for the season. “Boys,” he said. “I’ve got two rules. Rule #1: The coach is always right. Rule #2: If you think the coach is wrong, see Rule #1.“

Crucifixion was like that. If you were not a Roman citizen, Rome had two rules. Rome is in charge. And if you think Rome is not in charge, look around. Talk about a brutal advertising campaign: crucifixion killed two birds with one stone. It made a dying man a billboard.

Jesus knew that. He prepared for it by going alone to places (something we can relate to), going off by himself alone with increasing frequency as he began to attract a crowd. For him the presence of the One he called Father was most palpable when he isolated himself. Matthew tells us that Jesus withdrew “to a deserted place by himself” to absorb the shocking news that his cousin John had been beheaded. Off by himself he went to grieve the loss of the one who understood him best. Off by himself, Jesus “got his game face on.” Withdrawn in prayer, talking with the Father, ‘in solitude, for company’, to borrow a phrase from Auden, Jesus gathered strength to face the approach of his own violent death.

Before going out to meet Goliath, David picked up five stones. Before going out to meet the adversary, Jesus consecrated bread and wine with his disciples. Then after supper he said to them, “Where I am going, you cannot come.” And he left for the ultimate out-of-the-way place.

Ten years ago, at a quarter past six in the evening on Tuesday of Holy Week, a college classmate of my son Gabriel climbed the ten-foot-tall safety barrier surrounding the observation deck of the Empire State Building and jumped. Cameron had left a suicide note in his room at Berkeley, his residential college at Yale, apologizing for his plan to jump either from the George Washington Bridge or the Empire State Building. 

It was raining in New York. There were seven people on the observation deck at the time. One of them tried to talk him down. A reporter in the New York Daily News wrote, “A man named Luis Mosquea was manning the front entrance of a women’s boutique on West 34th Street across from where the young man landed, and he recalled in horror how stunned pedestrians scampered in every direction to flee the nightmarish sight. Said Mr Mosquea, ‘One guy ran over and covered the body with an umbrella.’”

At a vigil held the next night at Yale, the Berkeley Master Marvin Chun told a crowd of grieving students, “I saw Cameron as recently as yesterday, a few hours before he died. It was raining and I asked him to walk with me under my umbrella down Wall Street. He complimented my big, parachute-like umbrella with its bright red Berkeley shield. He said he didn’t know that there was a Berkeley umbrella. I said that it hadn’t been issued as Berkeley gear for a long time. And as we hit the corner I added that I could order a new batch if he really liked it. He said he did. Then we parted ways. So here’s the guilty thought that I shouldn’t have but I can’t get out of my mind. I wish I gave him that umbrella.”

You and I are “reconciled to God in Jesus’s fleshly body through his death.” I believe that. Where Jesus goes to confront the prince of darkness to do that awful work we cannot go. We follow as far as we can. But tonight, when he leaves for ‘movement to contact’, we part ways with him and listen for the cry and stillness to follow after. We may wish to help him, wish to give him the flimsy thing we carry for shelter; but there is nothing we can do to help him.  

Jesus is our champion. His combat in the darkness of Golgotha (“the place of the skull”) is his alone. Israel’s champion David smote Goliath using Goliath’s own sword to cut the giant’s head off. And winning victory on behalf of all the people of God, he took the skull to Jerusalem and buried it on a hill far away.

All we can do, confined to barracks, is shelter in place, from the bleachers, at the window, in the garden where the small birds sing. All we can do is overhear Jesus talking to the Father, in solitude, for company, taking strength for the fight from the Most High. 

And we look away. I look away. And I remember something else my coach used to say. “The will to win is not worth a nickel unless you have the will to prepare.” Jesus, our champion, had the will to prepare. He goes to the cross. And there, at Golgotha, he will take Satan’s greatest weapon, death, and run him through with it. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Auden | Easter

“Today, we find Good Friday easy to accept: what scandalizes us is Easter: Modern man finds a happy ending, a final victory of Love over the Prince of this World, very hard to swallow.”
— WH Auden, in draft notes on religion and theology

“It is finished.”

From John’s Gospel, “It is finished.” May I speak in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. On Christmas Day he was born and some thirty years later he died. There are two principal ways in which it is possible to tell his story. One is to tell it as the greatest, the most bitter and ironic of all human tragedies, a tragedy which sums up all tragedies. To understand what I mean, you must think your way back from Good Friday, the day he died, to Christmas, the day he was born.

Whatever you choose to make of the legends that have grown up around his birth — the angels appearing to the shepherds and singing their great hymn of joy, the magi and the star — however you want to interpret these stories, the jubilation and the mystery that the gospel writers were trying to convey by them is clear enough, and there is not one of you who in one way or another doesn’t respond to it. Think of what this church, any church, is like at Christmas — there’s an excitement, a kind of wild hopefulness and gladness in the air that makes it different from any other time of the year. 

No matter how cynical or unreligious you may think of yourself as being, you can’t escape the feeling then that something extraordinary and beautiful and glad­ is breaking into the world. You read your news with stories of international intrigue, political unrest, a virus outbreak in China, yet on the birthday of this child who died so long ago you get the feeling, despite all evidence to the contrary, that at last somehow there will be peace on earth and good will among all people.

You get a sort of intensified version of the feeling you have whenever a child is born: that here is a new life still unacquainted with grief and compromise; here perhaps is the child who will grow tall and strong and save the world because that is what we’re all waiting for — someone to save the world, someone who will bind up the wounds, who will set things straight again. And we think these things about this child because we view his birth from the perspective of his whole life, and we see him as the one who of all people might have actually had the wisdom, the gentleness and the power to do the job. And this is what he set out to do — to save the world.

But then jump from Christmas to Good Friday and think of how he died, this child — deserted by his friends, mocked by his enemies, strung up on a cross between two insurrectionists. If ever we want indication that love is powerless in a world of envy and fear, that goodness is inevitably overcome by evil, that belief in God is a tragic absurdity, then here, we are tempted to say, it is. And telling the story this way you can take his last words of all, as John reports them, the words he spoke just as he was dying, and make them the almost unbearably pathetic epilogue to the whole thing. “It is finished.”

Finished, defeated, done with, and nothing to show for it but a few broken hearts. I would be less than honest if I didn’t say that it is always possible that this is the truth of it, and I believe there is no Christian anywhere who has not had moments of fearing that it is, even Jesus himself whose last words according to Matthew and Mark were, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

And now, if you’ve been listening to me at all, you’ll expect me to tell you the other way of interpreting this story. But I would rather leave it as a question for you to answer for yourselves because in the long run it is only your own answer that you’ll really hear. If the story of Jesus of Nazareth does not mean that life is an absurd tragedy; if it is not the story of a good man who believed that he was the anointed one of God only to realize in the last moments of his life that there was no God; if this is not what the story means, then what does it mean?

“It is finished,” he said, and let me suggest just two things about those words. 

First, humankind’s work is finished. In crucifying this uniquely innocent man, someone who claimed nothing for himself but refused every chance for power that was given him, who was motivated entirely by his love for God and for us — in destroying him, we have really done our worst, and in the cross we are confronted by the ultimate expression of our folly, our self-destroying selfishness, our sin. If there is a God to judge us, then here is where God’s judgment must fall — where we took the purest ever to arise among us and killed him because his goodness was more than we could bear.

And secondly and lastly, the work of God is finished. Finished not in the sense of being ended because it is never ended, but in the sense of being complete. Here in the death of Jesus, God has spoken his final word about himself and his relationship to us, and it is a word which Jesus spoke to his disciples on the night when he was betrayed, last night: “Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you. This is my blood which is shed for you, and for many, for the forgiveness of sins.” In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.